📚 Andre's Goodreads Toolbox, v1.23.3

9 Perl-scripts for Goodreads.com—the world largest book (cataloging) community. What's new?

recentrated.pl

Checks all the books in your shelf for new ratings and notifies you via periodical e-mail. It helps discover new criticisms and users with interesting libraries. You can try this online if you don't want to install anything. It implements the "follow book" feature that was requested in the Goodreads forums. Usage+Screenshot

friendrated.pl

Prints all books rated 4 or 5 stars by 3 or more persons you follow (including friends). It implements the "books common among the people I follow" feature that was requested in the Goodreads forums. It also lists the most read authors, the most wished-for and hated books. Usage+Screenshot

friendnet.pl

Spiders your social network and creates files with edges and nodes which can be easily processed with social network analysis software. It answers questions like: Which members are popular among your friends? Usage+Screenshot

friendgroup.pl

Prints discussion groups common among the persons you follow (including friends). Searching groups on Goodreads is a PITA, and sometimes you don't know what you can have and wouldn't search for it. Usage+Screenshot

likeminded.pl

Prints Goodreads members who are interested in the same books as you. It implements the "Finding people based on the books they've read" feature that was requested in the Goodreads forums. Usage+Screenshot

similarauth.pl

Prints authors who Goodreads thinks are similar to all the authors you're reading. It implements the "Finding [all] similar authors" feature that was requested in the Goodreads forums. Usage+Screenshot

search.pl

Prints a books search result, ordered by average rating and number of ratings (most popular books), or date published, optionally with exact title matches. The Goodreads website doesn't offer it for some reason. It implements the "Sort search results by rating" feature that was requested in the Goodreads forums. Usage+Screenshot

savreviews.pl

Saves text-reviews for a book to a text-file. It implements the "Extract all reviews for a specific book" feature that was requested in the Goodreads forums. Usage+Screenshot

amz-tradein.pl

This script fetched Amazon Trade-In prices for all books in a Goodreads.com shelf ("resales" or "donations"). It automated regular manual bid-checking for hundreds of books, discovering sales opportunities. Amazon stopped its buyback program in 2015. Usage+Screenshot

Getting started

1a. Docker users can run the Toolbox in its own container(?), and view the results via web-browser at localhost:8080:

$ docker run -it --publish=8080:80 ghcr.io/andre-st/goodreads-toolbox

1b. users without Docker can try to install the Toolbox directly on their systems:

$ git clone https://github.com/andre-st/goodreads-toolbox.git
$ cd goodreads-toolbox
$ sudo make          # Gets required Perl modules from CPAN

2. at the prompt, try out the Toolbox programs:

$ ./example-script.pl --help

A Windows user wrote me that he ran the Toolbox on the Windows 10 Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Now, you can try Docker for Windows or Mac: unpack the project files somewhere, and run the ./Dockerfile

Long program runtimes: Goodreads slows down all requests and we have to load a lot of data. Start one program and do other things in the meantime. You can break any program with CTRL-C and continue later (reloads from a file-cache).

Contributing

• Reporting bugs / feature requests
  • add a new issue via Github's issue tracker
  • alternative contact options
  • thank you all who wrote me mails in the past or otherwise reported bugs and ideas 👍
• Writing your own scripts
  • see the tests directory for examples on how to use the toolbox library
  • see the toolbox library documentation
  • non-functional considerations
  • the less complex issues would be good first issues to work on for users who want to contribute to this project

Further readings

• About Goodreads
  • GR developers group
  • GR technology stack or here or here or DynamoDB+S3+Athena
  • GR workplace reviews, anonymously about being acquired by Amazon, bureaucracy etc.
  • GR on Crunchbase, people, recent news & activity
  • GR members stats or here or here+Sci-Hub or here or here, source probably Goodreads
  • GR on Slideshare, presenting GR book marketing to authors, see also Author Feedback Group
  • GR subreddit
• Further software
  • I leave statistics about your own reading habits to the following tools; my toolbox, in contrast, focuses on the social periphery, with Goodreads providing the largest user base
  • Paul Klinger's Bookstats or here
  • untested: John Smith's GoodreadsAnalysis
  • untested: Petr's CompareBooks browser extension adds "compare" info next to usernames
  • untested: Andrea Samorini's SamoGoodreadsUtility adds language filters to GR
  • untested: Danish Prakash's goodreadsh is a command line interface for Goodreads (off. API)
  • untested: Greasyfork Browser-Scripts
  • untested: the Bookar Android app visualizes your books in augmented reality
  • untested: save your shelves and reviews Goodreads data to SQLite
  • Amazon: export and filter long wishlists by priority and price (bargains)
• Other
  • Data: thousands of books and authors (not GR) https://openlibrary.org/developers/dumps
• Personal
  • a list of things that improved my Goodreads experience: settings, browser extensions etc.
  • Andre at Goodreads